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Are There Megastructures Orbiting Distant Star?

Interesting investigation. Something very curious in shape and size may be orbiting a distant star 1480 light years away. And what's more, it's being taken seriously.

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October 28, 2015 University Park, Pennsylvania - Last week on October 22nd, senior scientist Gerald Harp at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, California, reported to Universe Today: “We either caught something shortly after an event like two planets crashing together — or alien intelligence.” He was talking about a very strange star that astronomers call KIC 8462852. This large, mature star 1,480 light-years from Earth has the strangest star light dimming and brightening pattern of some 150,000 stars in the Milky Way Galaxy studied by the Kepler Space Telescope and Planet Hunters project. Kepler was launched by NASA on March 7, 2009, specifically to look for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.

I just think this also belongs in research as its beginning to take on some very heavy study. No longer a subject of curiosity, this will establish a precedent in astronomical study. I'm very interested in what comes out of the Keck study.

"For over four years, NASA’s Kepler mission measured the bright- ness of objects within a ∼ 100 square-degree patch of sky in the direction of the constellations Cygnus and Lyrae. The program’s targets were primarily selected to address the Kepler mission goals of discovering Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. Kepler tar- geted over > 150, 000 stars, primarily with a 30-minute observing cadence, leading to over 2.5-billion data points per year (> 10 bil- lion data points over the nominal mission lifetime).
The Kepler mission’s data processing and identification of transiting planet candidates was done in an automated manner through sophisticated computer algorithms (e.g., Jenkins et al. 2010)."